The brainy brand

And so the Obama post-election brand is now becoming clearer. As the impressed David Brooks notes, it's the brainy brand -- the senior Obama administration being made up, for the most part, of Harvard and Yale Law School graduates and Ivy League PhDs:

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

As the author of an outrageously elitist booky-wooky which assaults our democratic cult of mass ignorance, I'm unabashedly thrilled by Obama's respect for the achievement of America's meritocratic intellectual aristocracy. His will be a truly anti-Palinesque presidency and, while it's not entirely clear whether he'll rule from the right or the left, what is clear is that the Harvard Law School graduate will rule from above rather than from below. But this does create a problem. That's because his pre-election brand was as much focused on YOU as on Obama himself. As Oxford University's Paul Temporal argues about the brilliantly successful pre-election Obama brand:

Obama reached out to all his target audiences with a single powerful message embracing vision, values and competitive positioning: "Yes we can! And yes you can!" In addition, his brand communications strategy cleverly exploited the fact that no consumer can resist an approach that talks about them and helps them feel they are in control. Obama would say things like "This election is not about me – it’s about you" and ‘I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington......I’m asking you to believe in yours."

But, of course, Obama isn't a brand like a soap powder or a fizzy drink that exists simply to be bought, consumed and then forgotten until our next trip to the supermarket.  His pre-election brand have all been about making the voter as if they were in control. But now, with Geithner at Treasury, Summers at the White House, the Hillary show rolling into State and the rest of his Harvard-Yale dream team taking up their positions, Obama's post-election rule-from-above brand doesn't quite gel with the pre-election rule-from-below brand. So there needs to be a recalibration of the message. To rule effectively from above, Obama must explain that politics is a profession rather than a moral calling and that he's assembled the intellectually best and the brightest amongst us to fix America. In contrast with the plebeian populism of the Joe-the-Plumber crowd, Barack the President needs not only to rebuild America's infrastructure but also to rebuild the value of the skilled policy-maker as the heart and soul of the political process.

Comments

[Seth Finkelstein]

Nope. He's very skilled at presenting himself as acting as an agent of ordinary folks, even if he's not one himself. Right-wingers have been doing this for years. But it's not like they're the only ones who can do it(Michael Moore shows it can be done from the left, and that drives the right crazy).

[Vince Williams]

Temporal's best line was the bit about Obama's retail outlets ("Obama branches") covering the whole US with offers for accessories and memorabilia, as if such a brilliant campaign were just the political iteration of Oprah Winfrey's business plan.

That was good, in the tortured way of an El Greco dramatization.

I appreciate David Brooks' exultant sentiments about an administration peopled with the best and the brightest we've seen since Camelot, but there is something about his countenance that makes me want to slap him, lightly.

The swift movement by the perceptive brand-builders at Obama,Incorporated to assemble our new Round Table and populate it with excellence is commendable, and bodes well for Krugman's long interregnum between the election and the actual transfer of power, if nothing else does.

However, the one thing no one mentions about his putative 'brand', and just hinted at in Temporal's irreverent commentary, is the considerable sex appeal, in glamorous Kennedy style, of the Obama himself.

No doubt Skinnerian behaviorists would go wild with that one-- and some end-times Merlin raise the angry ghost of Jesse Helms.

[Eric Gauvin]

It's funny, I just noticed this at my local gas station. If people believe in their ability to change, they can smoke cigarettes.

(view image at link below)
http://www.ericgauvin.com

[Eric Gauvin]

I think I gave you the wrong link in my last comment. Please use this one which links directly to the post.

http://www.ericgauvin.com/?p=19

[Nathan]

Interesting article by Brooks.

If Team Obama fails then, it will be all the more spectacular, setting up 1980 all over again.

[Sue Schofield]

Is Ole Brown-Eyes losing the plot? We love Keen for his incising invective, and pointy views on Old Meeja versus the Web 2.0 upstarts; not for yet more analysis of why Obama wears a red tie instead of a blue one.

That's the trouble with US politics, it's so self-important, and believes implicitly that the rest of the world is interested. Of course, since the Seventies, when a B52 flies overhead, we in the mysterious East ( of Washington) all look up nervously, but rrrrrrrrrrreally, old chap , the inter-web is international. And not all of us need to know why the US is going bankrupt, just like the UK.

Meantime, over on the real battle front, weasel-fink Jeff Jarvis et al are publishing yet more books (aren't books so Ol Meeja', Jeff), while Brown-Eyes fiddles with Open Office.

Could I have a little more elitist Web 2.0 polemicism, AJ, instead of this beige wallpaper of political analysis? Otherwise I'll have to de-camp to Jarvis's blog with the rest of the plebian populists.

Oba ma dead body.

You read that joke here first.

[Mike Whatley]

Ok Andrew help me through this. My neck still hurts from nodding in agreement throughout Susan Jacoby's book recently. And the vulgar populism of Sarah Palin made me nauseous from the very moment she was selected. And I am the son of 2 Phd's. (I'm trying to tell you I know a "pointy head" when I see one!)

So if these "exultant sentiments" are to be validated, then why is Obama's proposed "jolt" to the economy focused on the uneducated working class? Jobs that will "rebuild infrastructure" but once completed what will these people of low skills do?

David Brooks called them the "formerly middle class".

Here's what all of these erudite super achievers working for Obama know: The globalized knowledge worker economy will be cruel to the uneducated. The next decade will see them economically washed away by the millions.

The tools of production are now in the hands of everyone. (Karl Marx Triumphant!) But the ability to engage and create with those tools will remain the province of the educated. And even that class will have a challenge to stay economically viable.

So where does this leave Obama and his brilliant team?
Have I missed something?

mike

[Vince Williams]

If our European friends in the 'mysterious East' really all look up nervously when a B-52 flies overhead, then I would expect them to be very interested in US politics, (but Great Britain isn't Europe, is it-- long as there's pound sterling and an English Channel?)

I'd pretend I was in Spain from beneath my sheltered palm in the Isles of Scilly and consider 'the east' La Manche.

[Ian Thorpe]

Obama is slotting a lot of harvard Law School grads into his team, the point you miss Andrew is how many of them have made careers as time servers in The Clinton Adminitration or the political machines of Chicago and Illinois.

We should also not forget that the campaign's micro-management of a compliant media echoed the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, the rather creepy personality cult that has grown around The Obamessiah and the authoritarian tendencies he has shown before and since the election.

All in all he and his team of Harvard nerds scare the shit out of me.

[Vince Williams]

Ian's penetrating analysis of the Obama campaign is a model of subtlety and nuance. His impeccably well-supported case puts to rest any counter-argument and pins Adolf's bristly moustache right where it belongs, as any raving lunatic can see.